The Decline of Streaking

Fifty years ago, you couldn’t watch a live televised event without the possibility that a nude person might beeline past the camera. Streaking burst onto the scene in the 1970s, when media outlets began writing about college fraternities embracing the practice, and it quickly grew into a cultural phenomenon. Streakers crashed the Oscars, the Olympics, Wimbledon, a handful of rugby games, a Pan Am flight, and a plaza on Wall Street. In 1974, a hair stylist ran through the state legislature in Hawaii and named himself the “Streaker of the House”—and he wasn’t the only one to interrupt a lawmaking session. The phenomenon became so pervasive that, in 1974, a song called “The Streak,” by Ray Stevens, spent three weeks atop the Billboard singles chart.  

These days, I’m willing to bet there are few if any rogue nudists blazing across your phone or computer screen. “It seems like a dying art,” Cara Snyder, a professor of women’s, gender, and sexuality studies at the University of Louisville, told me. The act “still remains on the sporting periphery,” but is fading in athletics too, says Geoffery Z. Kohe, a lecturer in sports policy and management at the University of Kent who has written about the topic. Where did all the naked dashers go?

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Over the years, successfully streaking has become a lot harder—and riskier. Fewer people are watching the live TV events that catapulted streakers to fame. The number of people with cable or a live subscription through a streaming service has fallen by more than 25 million in the past decade. Of course, some televised occurrences do draw lots of viewers, but those are rarer and more heavily policed. Since 9/11, especially, stripping down and running across a stage has elicited not confused laughter but armed security. A few people still attempt it, including at several recent Super Bowls and a number of NBA games, but the footage of those naked runs is almost never shown for long on air. TV networks such as the BBC now direct their producers to zoom out so that the streaker barely appears on-screen. Streaking is about getting a reaction, which isn’t possible if no one sees you.

Perhaps more fundamentally, nudity—particularly male nudity—is not as shocking these days. TV shows such as Naked and Afraid, in which a man and a woman are stranded in a remote location without any clothing, have desensitized viewers to nude bodies. At this year’s Academy Awards, to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the original Oscars streaker, John Cena parodied the act. He showed up nearly naked—and he had full permission to do so. Think of the Oscars’ embrace of nudity as streaking’s death knell. After all, there’s no faster way to kill a trend than to turn it into a corporate marketing tool. Companies such as Vodafone and GoldenPalace.com have hired streakers to advertise their services. The model Kelly Kay Green streaked at the 2020 Super Bowl in order to boost her Instagram following. Stripping down on TV has simply lost its edge—though, depending on who you ask, it may never have had any real edge at all.

To some, streaking was a radical manifestation of the era of sexual liberation. In 1974, the medical writer Murray Elkins declared that it was the “latest attempt to erode and destroy convention, decency, and decorum.” But despite a few early tries—most notably in the 1970s, when streakers at the University of Wisconsin chanted “Dicks against Dick” to call for President Richard Nixon’s impeachment—streaking never caught on as a mode of protest. Civil-rights activists considered “streak-ins,” but ultimately worried that they “might possibly turn off a few people,” as one student said at the time. Streakers were being rebellious, but they weren’t rebelling against anything in particular.

This aligns with how many streakers themselves have talked about their motivations. Erika Roe, who streaked during a 1982 rugby game, recently told the British magazine The Fence that she did it on impulse. The well-known streaker Mark Roberts once wrote, according to The New York Times, that he streaks because “it gives me a buzz” and makes “the crowd laugh.” They didn’t have any grand goals; they were just … doing it.

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After initial ambivalence, many right-wing commentators decided that streakers were just letting off steam. The conservative National Review called the streaker “a humorist, a reliever of tensions,” and George Will claimed that streaking was “just what America needs” to bring it together. Some even saw the practice as an explicitly anti-feminist project, a “kind of reassertion of white masculinity,” as Bill Kirkpatrick, a sociology professor at the University of Winnipeg, put it to me. Streakers were, after all, mostly white men without any connection to a justice movement. One 1974 letter to the editor of Time summed up this view succinctly: “When women start wearing the pants, men start shedding them.”

Although most streakers never became activists, some protesters have resorted to nudity over the past few decades. In 2013, women’s-liberation activists confronted Russian President Vladimir Putin topless, and African feminists have long used their unclothed bodies to shame powerful men. Most prominently, in 2002, hundreds of Nigerian women disrobed in protest of the oil giant Chevron Texaco. Whereas streakers are by definition on the run, usually from security personnel who want to apprehend them, these more recent protests are typically stationary. They involve a direct standoff with the powerful. Athletes, who were once among streaking’s primary witnesses, are partaking as well on social media. In Brazil, members of the Meninos Bons de Bola, a transmasculine soccer team, posted half-naked photos on Facebook in 2017 to protest then-President Jair Bolsonaro’s anti-trans policies, using their bodies to bring visibility to the trans community. These acts resonate, according to Snyder, the University of Louisville professor, because nudity isn’t incidental to the message, but a fundamental part of it.

Perhaps if more unclothed solo runners were to ally themselves with political movements, streaking could see a resurgence. At the London Olympics in 2012, one streaker, bearing the message “Free Tibet,” did block the Olympic torch relay. But there haven’t been any other similarly high-profile political streakers since. The Olympics were once the “holy grail” of streaking (according to a now-defunct website dedicated to the activity), thanks to the sheer number of viewers the competition drew. At the Paris Olympics next month, the opening ceremony will feature a security presence that the Associated Press calls “massive.” Getting past all those layers of policing to capture the eyes of the world would certainly provoke a sense of wonder—or at least serve as a brief reminder of the golden age of streaking, which, like the act itself, was over as soon as it began.